Experts axed by Trump keep climate information flowing
With 100,000 federal science agency jobs and funding for weather and ocean monitoring falling victim to current US policy, experts are warning that the US
With 100,000 federal science agency jobs and funding for weather and ocean monitoring falling victim to current US policy, experts are warning that the US is ceding its global lead in climate research. But a group of undeterred former government workers have secured funding they say will help keep the nation in the picture about the realities of a warming world. Climate.us, built by former staff of the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate.gov website, aims to restore access to "accurate, accessible and scientifically rigorous" climate information, raising awareness around heat waves, storms, sea level rise and more. The staff started rescuing information from the old website after the project fell victim to terminations and funding cuts soon after president Donald Trump — who has called climate change a scam and a hoa took office for the second time in early 2025. Climate.gov, which had about 15 million page views in 2024 and was growing yearly, was redirected to a different NOAA site controlled by political appointees put in place by an administration hostile to climate action. "Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change," said Rebecca Lindsey, managing director of Climate.us. Lindsey told DW the popularity of the old Climate.gov site showed people "in the US do want unbiased, trustworthy information about climate. They're interested in it. They're concerned about it." US president Donald Trump is supporting coal and the fossil fuel sector rather than clean energy research and implementation Image: Daniel Torok/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA/picture alliance Climate.us first came online in 2025 to house information from the old government website but the new iteration will now start providing additional content, including news, stories, expert blogs, data visualizations, reports on climate indicators and classroom resources.
Scientists will work voluntarily to vet the content for accuracy, and the site is being supported by thousands of small donations from the US and around the world. "It's just so heartening to get this outreach from other countries because I'm aware that other nations would have every right to think, well, America, you've shot yourself in the foot," said Lindsey, who lost her Climate.gov job in February 2025. The relaunch is part of a wider fightback to preserve access to scientific data and knowledge, as the Trump administration cuts funding for public science. The cuts — including a proposal to slash $1.6 billion (€1.464 billion) from NOAA in the next federal budget — risk the US losing "hundreds of years of collective expertise in a variety of areas" and is a "threat to innovation," warned Jules Barbati-Dajches of the Union of Concerned Scientists. What's the big deal if funding and jobs are cut in the federal workforce? The US federal workforce has shrunk by around 12% under Trump, but some 40% of those losses came from science agencies, according to the Partnership for Public Service. Federal science agencies shed close to 118,000 employees in the 18 months between September 2024 and February 2026, with grant funding for environmental research and innovation — including monitoring how chemicals and heat harm human health — falling by 79%. Trump won the US election on November 5, 2024, and was inaugurated on January 20, 2025. Brandon Lardy, the Partnership's data director, says the impact is being felt in places where contracts have been canceled abruptly and research spaces suddenly shuttered. Communities are left vulnerable to polluted water and air, extreme weather and infectious diseases spread by insects whose range is expanding as temperatures rise.
The BriefWire